bens_dad

I managed to kick my cold enough to play the ice hockey tournament Saturday and Sunday afternoons. One of my teammates gave me a lift from Cambridge rink to Romford each day. It's an easy drive and we get on well, and the tournament itself was great fun. Exhausting, but fun and definitely great for developing and improving play. The other four teams playing were pretty friendly and we made some connections and enthusiasm for playing more games against each other as individual teams.

Unfortunately my ride home got injured in the last few seconds of the last game of the tournament on Sunday evening, a "needs A&E and good drugs" level injury. So I went with him to the local A&E on the grounds they'd probably want a responsible non-drugged adult to get him home, and it'd only be a few hours, right? Ahahaha, it was 16 hours before we got out and it was not a good experience.

Also neither of us had showered between "playing lots of ice hockey" and "showing up at A&E", so very sorry to anyone who had to sit too near either of us.

I got a very minimal amount of work done today on my phone from the hospital, but went to bed for a few hours as soon as I finally got home and feel more human now. I will have to figure out whether I take leave for today or make up the effort elsewhere in the week. But that is a problem for tomorrow; tonight I'm hoping to reset my sleep schedule by going to bed on time.

Goodness having a cold is dull. I spent most of yesterday resting/asleep, felt able to work today, but did it from home and definitely favoured the easier tasks from the todo list. I skipped indoor cricket this afternoon, and TriBase scrimmage tonight, in favour of continuing the recovery curve enough to play an ice hockey tournament this weekend.

I have successfully wrangled a car pool for the Kodiaks B to go to Gosport next weekend, which includes me driving a hired 9-seater, whee. Car pooling has been wrangled, mostly not by me, to get Warbirds to Romford tomorrow and Sunday. (The women's team and the mostly-men's team living up to stereotypes about planning, not for the first time.) The weekend after Gosport is playoffs in Sheffield, where we see if Kodiaks A can win promotion to the next division, and as a bonus I can meet up with my mother-in-law.

A couple of weeks before my Czech holiday I started taking all the morning school runs while Tony took the afternoons, after a long period where it was mostly the other way around. It is suiting me much more than I had expected, and has also led to me going to the office a lot more. Essentially, once I've cycled to school, it's as easy to go to the office as to go home, and usually I'll go to the office. Partly because my role and personality make "useful spontaneous in-person conversations" more likely to happen. Partly because once I'm on site, it's easier to take advantage of the university's Active Staff programme. I'm generally only working from home now when not-quite-well (as today) or if my schedule is All Online Meetings All The Time. The downside of the office is I have no privacy at the hotdesks and need to use a pod for meetings. I quite like the pods, but not for hours on end.

Active Staff is a recent initiative of the University Sports Service. Through it, I can get two exercise classes a week for free (mostly yoga, pilates and similar) and additional ones at the Sports Centre on a PAYG basis. While the most popular classes often book out really fast, people seem pretty good about cancelling if they can't make it, so a space often pops up the night before or morning of. I can also join the indoor cricket and table tennis "Give It A Go" sessions which are shared with students, which is how I've ended up playing cricket again for the first time since I was a teenager. It's not helping my workload problem but it's not making it worse, and it is bringing me a fair bit of joy, so I'll call it a win.

Thu 24 Apr: tried out a Learn to Play session at Alexandra Palace. It's a great session, the coach is good, but it's very late at night - so late it's not actually possible to get home by public transport afterward. My friend P drove us (now she has an ULEZ-compliant car) but we got home at 2am and my alarm goes off at 7am and I was really struggling on Friday. In theory I would like to go again, but in practice I haven't felt up to it since.

Sat 26 Apr: away game for Kodiaks B in Oxford. Our first away game of the season, our first game with none of our league players, and my first game as Captain. We lost 7-17 but it was honestly a good-tempered and positive atmosphere and some fantastic learning and effort displayed. Our goalie was playing her first full game ever (having played ten minutes in our previous game), and you could see her improving almost minute by minute.

Sun 27 Apr: social visit to beckyc and S, then a lift with one of the Kodiaks A players and her dad from Huntingdon to Peterborough to watch the league team beat Peterborough 15-2 and secure the top spot in WNIHL 2S. Then a lift back with a different player to Cambridge in time for bed Sunday evening.

Thu 1 May: outdoor cricket game, my first this century (hehe). An internal game to warm up for the summer, as West Cambridge has enough people for two teams. I enjoyed fielding, got over my nerves enough to (badly) bowl a single over, and ended up in bat for rather longer than expected. Mostly due to my batting partner, but I at least managed not to do anything catastrophic when I was facing the ball.

Fri 2 May: summer scrimmages with TriBase are back, so I went along; it's the first time I've played with this team since September, and I was pleasantly surprised by how much I've improved since then. (Don't get me wrong, I'm still not really up to their standard, but the gap has closed a lot and I'm keeping up a lot better.)

Sat 3 May: last Kodiaks A home game of the season, this time for the league Cup, which they also won. I have finally built a confident enough team for the off-ice work that I could stay entirely on front-of-house during the game, freeing up our steady ticket sales volunteer to watch a whole game. I missed quite a bit of it due to talking to people (shocking I know).

Sun 4 May: trip to London for a hockey friend's birthday, but with bonus addition of brunch beforehand at Dishoom with my baby sibling. The bottomless house chai is still my favourite. The birthday celebration was outdoors in a park, and the weather got steadily chillier as the afternoon went on. I managed to leave my sunhat behind in my friend's flat (this is the hat I bought in San Sebastián last summer after losing the previous sunhat somewhere on a hill, itself a replacement for one I left on a train earlier that summer), but it will make its way back to me eventually, I'm sure.

Mon 5 May: over to see naath in Bury St Edmunds, where I got caught in the traditional Bank Holiday rain on the way to get lunch from M&S. You know you're not in Cambridge any more when there are dozens of car parking spaces on the high street but no cycle racks.

This afternoon I should have been playing cricket again with West Cambridge after work, but I started going down with a cold yesterday afternoon and have spent most of the time since in bed feeling sorry for myself. I am really hoping to be recovered by Saturday as I have an ice hockey tournament to play with Warbirds on both Saturday and Sunday afternoons. I also have a bunch of things I want to do tomorrow, but I guess I'll just have to see how I'm doing in the morning. (We have covid tests still, they've all come back negative, but even "just a cold" is a miserable experience, ugh, so I'm attempting to avoid sharing it with the household or indeed anyone else.)